A number of historians and biographers have explained the famed Tory statesman’s invocation of his Jewish heritage, in his novels and elsewhere, as a way of making himself attractive to aristocratic figures through a connection with an exotic and in its own way noble Sephardi lineage. In his recent biography of Disraeli, the late David Cesarani attacks this claim and proposes another:

Disraeli’s Hebraic rhapsodies did not endear him to the aristocrats he was [supposedly] impressing with his Jewish genealogy and racial genius. On the contrary, they were offended by the claims made in [his novel] Tancred, irritated by his parliamentary speeches [in favor of expanding Jews’ political rights] in 1847, and outraged by [by ideas about Judaism and Christianity he put forward in his biography of his erstwhile patron] Lord George Bentinck.

By contrast, if they were not euphoric about his interventions, the Rothschilds [the Jewish banking family] were at least mildly flattered. A more credible explanation of Disraeli’s “Jewish explosion” is that it served as neither compensation nor consolation [for lack of aristocratic roots]; it was intended to make him appear more Jewish to get closer to the Rothschilds. . . . Such a tactic fits his pattern of behavior and requires no convoluted explanations or contorted chronology.

Disraeli’s approach to the Rothschilds was largely successful, although they never felt entirely comfortable with him. The nub of the problem was his attitude toward Judaism. When he did not directly denigrate their religion, he tacitly reproached them for not being Christians. The only way he could connect with them was by stressing their “racial” affinity. . . . [T]here was an inverse relationship between his devaluation of Judaism, inherited from his father, and his exaggerated claims for the potency and genius of the Jewish “race,” which [his father] Isaac would have deplored. Disraeli’s self-racialization was the curious solution to his dual identity: it enabled him to be a Jew and a Christian at the same time.

While I’ve seen much speculation—some reasonable and well informed, some quite the opposite—about why Jerusalem chose Friday morning to begin its campaign against Iran, the most obvious explanation seems to be the most convincing. First, 60 days had passed since President Trump warned that Tehran had 60 days to reach an agreement with the U.S. over its nuclear program. Second, Israeli intelligence was convinced that Iran was too close to developing nuclear weapons to delay military action any longer. Edward Luttwak explains why Israel was wise to attack:

Iran was adding more and more centrifuges in increasingly vast facilities at enormous expense, which made no sense at all if the aim was to generate energy. . . . It might be hoped that Israel’s own nuclear weapons could deter an Iranian nuclear attack against its own territory. But a nuclear Iran would dominate the entire Middle East, including Egypt, Jordan, the United Arab Emirates, and Bahrain, with which Israel has full diplomatic relations, as well as Saudi Arabia with which Israel hopes to have full relations in the near future.

Luttwak also considers the military feats the IDF and Mossad have accomplished in the past few days:

To reach all [its] targets, Israel had to deal with the range-payload problem that its air force first overcame in 1967, when it destroyed the air forces of three Arab states in a single day. . . . This time, too, impossible solutions were found for the range problem, including the use of 65-year-old airliners converted into tankers (Boeing is years later in delivering its own). To be able to use its short-range F-16s, Israel developed the “Rampage” air-launched missile, which flies upward on a ballistic trajectory, gaining range by gliding down to the target. That should make accuracy impossible—but once again, Israeli developers overcame the odds.